We’ve seen that je suis can contract in informal language to what sounds like chu or chui. But where does that ch sound come from in chu and chui, considering there isn’t any ch sound in je suis to begin with?

To get the pronunciation chui, je suis contracts to j’suis.Je loses its vowel sound, and the resulting j’s makes the French ch sound. The same thing happens with chu, which is je suis contracted to j’su’s.

So the ch sound comes from j’s.

This is why je sais contracted informally to j’sais sounds like ché. It’s also why je sois contracted to j’sois sounds like choi. Je savais contracted to j’savais sounds like chavais. Anywhere you have the informally contracted j’s, you have the ch sound.

I watched the first 10 minutes of an episode of 30 vies on tou.tv and picked some French for us to look at.

Each example of French below was said by a character on the show. If you want to find them on the show, the episode details are at the end of the post. After each quote, I’ve included the time where it appeared.

You can watch 30 vies on tou.tv if you’re in Canada.

Là, tu fais ça ou tu disparais de ma vie. C’est-tu clair?
Now you’re gonna do it or you get out of my life. Is that clear?
(0:22)

We’ve been seeing in the last few entries that là often means “now.” Here’s another example of it. Here, it means more “now” in the sense of “right so,” as a way of signalling that the other person ought to listen up. The speaker used it to lead into her nasty comment.

A student at school told his classmate: ça parle de toi en masse. The subject ça here just means “people” or “they.” It’s like the subject on. The expression en masse means something like “big time” or “totally.”

J’en peux p’us is a shortened, colloquial way of saying je n’en peux plus.Plus here is pronounced plu, but sometimes plus gets shortened to the pronunciation pu, which I’ve spelled above as p’us. It’s because the L dropped.

J’sus (pronounced chu) means je suis. J’sus à boutte literally means “I’m at the end,” because boutte means bout, but its figurative meaning is “I’ve had it.” You’ll notice that bout is sometimes pronounced boutte in Québec, especially in informal expressions like the one here; être à boutte, to have had it, to be fed up.

The character who said j’sus à boutte didn’t pronounce it as chu à boutte though. She pronounced it instead as chtàboutte. She shortened chu to ch and slipped in a T sound between ch and à (ch-t-à boutte).

It’s a small difference, but the Québécois will hear it. If you’re not sure what this ts thing sounds like, there’s only one remedy — start listening to lots of spoken French from Québec. If you haven’t listened to much spoken French before, you might not notice the ts sound at first. But once you’ve managed to hear it, you’ll realise just how prevalent its use really is.